The women from the Oseberg ship burial

Two Norwegian women, known only through their archaeological remains, were buried in great pomp during the early ninth century, lying on a splendid bed within the wooden walls of a stately ship.

The set of rites chosen for this greatest of journeys, on which the two Oseberg women were to embark, served complex social and psychological functions. The ship seems an obvious physical and metaphorical means of transportation to the next world, where its regal passengers would require all the trappings of a royal household, and victuals – bread dough in a trough; apples in a bucket – to sustain them on the passage. It was fitted out with chandler’s supplies: rope, an anchor, sailcloth. And yet, no warriors, real or symbolic, sat at their oars, fifteen on each side, to power the craft towards its destination. Did it lie rocking gently at its dreamy mooring, forever awaiting a non-existent crew who would join their mistresses in their time? What motivations lay behind the enormous investment of labour and ceremonial that must have accompanied their last rites?

The identities of the two interred women have fascinated archaeologists and anthropologists since they were excavated.

The detail of their equipment suggests care and planning, like the manifest of a serious expedition: two oil lamps, a stool and three large chests; axes and a quern stone; no fewer than five looms, with a spindle and distaff and assorted weaving equipment; a pouch containing cannabis leaves; combs, bedlinen and a feather mattress speak of more than mere symbolic preparation. It looks, in fact, for all the world like a house-clearance, and it may be that those who buried these women – their relatives and functionaries – intended just that: the possessions belonged to the dead; they were unclean or tainted, not fit for the survivors to enjoy and profit from. Perhaps we should see the ship not as a metaphor for the greatest journey, but as a skip: a refuse facility.

In contrast, Wynfl?d, were we to find and excavate her mortal remains, would have been buried in a plain tunic with, perhaps, little more than a knife and chatelaine to identify her as the head of a noble household; possibly with a pendant cross, like the woman in the Trumpington bed burial; brooches at her shoulders and her little box of spinning and weaving essentials. As a Christian woman, she must leave all other material possessions, all trappings and evidence of her wealth and power, behind on her prospective journey as a companion of Christ. The Oseberg women were, ironically, supposed to stay where they were put, equipped for departure but trapped in a netherworld. In the Scandinavian imagination dwelt a dread of revenance – the idea that the dead might return to haunt the living: so, after the tender goodbyes, the door was slammed shut.

The textile fragments retrieved from the burial give us an idea of not just the mercantile reach of wealthy Norwegian traders, but also of the kaleidoscopic variety of yarns, fabrics and patterns produced by workshops across Europe and beyond. Tent coverings, drapery and bedlinen were made of coarse wool fabrics on looms set up like the reconstructed example from Pakenham, some using desirable diamond twills for their lozenge effect. Fragments of embroidered cloth, some of them likely to have been produced in English workshops, show spiral and tendril motifs or animals. More than a dozen silk fabrics were recovered, possibly liturgical cloths from churches inside the Frankish empire – the silk thread itself imported from Asia or the Mediterranean. Patterned, multi-coloured tablet-woven bands might have been produced by the Oseberg women themselves. Two ornamental tapestries had been woven using wool for the warp and a finer linen yarn for the weft, the patterns portraying people, animals and carts, perhaps in a ceremonial procession that reminds one of the Mochica images found in South America.

There is something more, perhaps, to say about the burial rites of two broadly compatible Germanic societies that, from the seventh century onwards, had chosen diverging cultural paths even if they shared much of the same heritage. The Christian Anglo-Saxon state was the product of an overtly rational ideological relationship between the material and spiritual, as the Venerable Bede had so eloquently but pejoratively pictured it in the moment of conversion. The ‘pagan’ life was brief, like the flitting of a sparrow into and out of the light and life of a great hall in winter: beyond, all was darkness and uncertainty. The Christian state invested in freehold property on earth and in a parallel set of eternal relations with the world hereafter; it sought permanence, stability, accumulation: the everlasting. Material possessions were not only unnecessary on the great journey beyond, but to bury or burn them was a waste. Wynfl?d was able and determined to invest the fruits of her successful life in a new generation, worthy to succeed and build on the foundations that she laid in her will. Those who buried the Oseberg women with such apparently profligate waste and consumption must wipe the slate clean and begin again. Their daughters must weight the warps on their own newly built looms and quarry new millstones to grind corn. How ironic that those cultures who discard their objects with such enthusiasm provide the richest resources for the archaeologist seeking to understand them.